All Networks are Created Equal?

I want to use this space to elaborate on a point I made during our discussion of Inventing the Internet . Not only did military funding (i.e. DARPA) contribute to the creation and development of the Internet, it continues to play a central role in its advancement (i.e. Carnegie Mellon's $66 million of DoD funding in 2007). The ways in which Benkler describes the "networked information economy" does not only apply to the media, or the academy, or social interaction, but to warfare , and it has for a long time. DARPA researchers John Arquilla and David F. Ronfeldt created the buzzword "netwar" to describe the new type of modern warfare. No longer do we see guerrillas against central states, we see networked guerillas versus networked states. In one of the innumerable scary passages from their 1994 project The Advent of Netwar they write, "Netwar is blurring the line between peace and war, offense and defense, and combatant and non-combatant. As a result, the United States will face a new generation of nettlesome challenges that, in our view, will require new doctrines and strategies to combat them" (2). Well, yeah. Good call, DARPA.

The point here is that "the wealth of networks" that Benkler argues for is not only the "wealth of democracy" but the war all-the-time ideology of the something we may try to define as the Network-Industrial-Complex. In fact, the democracy Benkler calls for may be part of the need to implant democracy in intransigent nation states, or even the need to continue manufacturing nation-states at all. Arquilla and Ronfelt characterize netwar as: "about Hamas more than the PLO, Mexico's Zapatistas more than Cuba's Fidelistas, the Christian Identity Movement more than the Ku Klux Klan, the Asian Triads more than the Sicilian Mafia, and Chicago's Gangsta disciples more than the Al Capone gang" (5). They don't mention Al Qaida, but one cannot help but read them into this list. But the scariest thing about their proposition is that not just "sleeper cells" and "rogue agents" but western democracies as well. We can create our own list. EU more than France, League of Democracies more than UN, Coalition more than US, etc. Networks are not inherently resistant anymore than they are inherently imprisoning. The scary reality is that they are hegemonic.

Read more about the dystopian future for free at RAND.org! Get RANDY! http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR789/index.html

When I was a girl, we sent our emails on long sheets, made from trees - calld it "paper"!

While I had my issues with certain aspects of Benkler's argument (frequent use of vagaries like "anyone can publish" or "attractive public sphere"), It nevertheless made me nostalgic (in advance) for disappearing forms of mass media.

In sections 13 and 14, he describes blogs and wikis as "weighted" - meaning they vary in the degree of moderation exercised by the person in charge. I wished at this point that I could remind Benkler that the idea of a moderated forum for comments on a media source is not entirely new. Letters to the editor, in fact, offered a similar model, although as Benkler points out later, the criteria for endowment with this kind of editorial power is different on the internet. In a sense, though, I think our perception of newspapers as invariably heavily moderated is skewed by a general scholarly overepmhasis on metropolitan, bourgeois media. Small town and working class media emphasize different degrees of control and offer an outlet for different kinds of commentary, for a variety of small or large audiences, much like blogs and wikis. Granted, you didn't have the totally unmoderated end of the spectrum in, say, newspapers, but that's pretty rare on blogs and wikis anyway. All I'm really trying to say is that this kind of claim often perpetuates the myth that modes of communication on the internet are often seen as wildly different from their predecessors, and we might do well to pay attention to residual practices once in a while too.

This led me to wonder how long the residual form will stick around - who writes letters to newspaper editors now? Newspapers and letter-writing alike seem to me like nearly extinct phenomena. But I'm not fully convinced that the technology was the driving force behind this shift. It seems that generations x and y had been accused of carrying an overwhelming sense of apathy even before we lost interest in writing angry letters. Perhaps the technology arose out of our desire for instant gratification, as well as our desire to dispel these suspicions of apathy without having to do a lot of work.

the revolution will not be televised, but it might be blogged

In his valiant attempt to gauge the democaticizing effects of the Internet, Yochai Benkler places a lot of emphasis on user-created and regulated content. Indeed, this is a hot topic in the Internet world, a phenomenon commonly known as "Web 2.0." Personally, and I think Benkler would agree, the whole "Web 2.0" concept, inaugurated in 2004 at O'Reilly Media's eponymous convention, is a little too optimistic. It is certainly not the "revolution" that founder Tim O'Reilly claims that it is. Rather, "Web 2.0" is just a fancy name for recent trends in Internet usage, in which collaborative work, open source material, and user control are common goals. So I would like to take this opportunity to use one of the "Web 2.0" crown jewels, the blog, to examine the blog. Initiate meta-blog.

In my mind, this is the big difference between the blog as a source of information and the mass media as a source of information. A blog can be boring and irrelevant to 99% of potential readers -- meaning anyone with an Internet connection -- yet continue to exist. It is important as a medium because it allows into broader circulation (though not necessarily demographically) a whole set of discourses that would never be considered "air worthy" in the traditional mass media sense. Television, radio, newspaper and magazine companies only disseminate information that they consider to be worth the capital necessary to do so. As such, they generally feel an obligation to air or publish things that will yield returns. Even entities like the Washington Post, known for printing daring and revelatory material, stake their claim for validity on the fact that they produce hard-hitting stories. If a subject is not particularly arresting, mass media entities are often obliged to "punch it up" a bit. I'm thinking here of the weeks upon weeks of repackaged Natalee Holloway coverage on FOXNews, long after all the other networks had moved on. The issue I am talking around here is sensationalism, and though it may not always take a form as obvious as purple prose or yellow journalism, it is always, to some degree, present in the mass media.

Blogs need not be sensational and most are not hard hitting. They are valuable because they allow into circulation a whole set of ideas that would never be considered worthy of airwaves or newsprint. Blogger.com does not depend on this post to receive a certain amount of hits, create advertising revenue, and pay for itself (at least partially) the way other media do. So I argue, blogs are not innovative because they can be posted by anyone and read by anyone. The forte of the blog is its ability to reach a targeted number of readers, while at the same time being generally ignored by everyone else. A blog need not be interesting to the public at large (I dare say ours is probably not). Thus freed from the obligation to be entertaining or arresting to a wide set of readers, a blog (like ours) can actually get down to the business of addressing issues. 

Benkler's first two case studies are exemplary. No mass media outlet would dare publish thousands of corporate emails. Why? The answers, ordered from most relevant to least in terms of media concern (1) it would not sell (2) it's illegal. Until they had been made sufficiently salient issues through the investigative efforts of concerned citizens, no media outlet would touch the Sinclair and Diebold scandals. However, those small groups of concerned citizens who coalesced into full-fledged movements would never have had access to the information had it not been made available online, where it passed unnoticed by the public-at-large.

In sum, I'm happy that most people will not read this blog, nor care to. It is a forum for our group to discuss issues that we find relevant to our course, our readings, and our papers, without having to strike a hard-hitting or sensational pose. If some net stumbler happens across it and finds it relevant and intriguing, great. But, if not, our little blog is still a success if only for this reason: I would rather speak thoughtfully and productively in a small group than recklessly shout to hold the attention of a large one.

The internet's not all that

Yochai Benkler has a good strategy in this chapter. He addresses the criticisms that are most frequently levied at the claim that the internet democratizes by suggesting that we compare our contemporary networked public sphere with the previous, mass-media dominated one, not some idyllic world in which everyone can speak and everyone will be heard. Benkler argues, “There has never been a complex, modern democracy in which everyone could speak and be heard by everyone else. The correct baseline is the one-way structure of the commercial mass media” (¶ 61). This move allows Benkler to assert that the networked public sphere does democratize; Benkler takes a position best characterized as “It’s not perfect, but it’s better than what we had.” I like this claim and even agree with it, but I want to look at it in closer detail. I’m just not sure about the dichotomy of “networked public sphere” vs. “mass media.”

Buttressing Benkler’s “ better than what we had” claim is his suggestion that more people have the ability to produce and publish in the networked public sphere than in the old, mass-mediated model: “Computer literacy and skills, while far from universal, are much more widely distributed than the skills and instruments of mass-media production” (¶ 42). I think this is an important point. Certainly it’s much easier for average people to voice their opinions online than to get them in television, radio, or a newspaper. But, as Benkler acknowledges, the ability to voice your opinions online is “far from universal.” This whole accessibility issue is a big concern of mine, and it’s related to my questioning of the dichotomy.

Benkler tries to be fair here, but he’s too hasty. The "networked public sphere" leaves many people out: those who can’t afford computer technology or internet access and those who aren’t computer savvy. In addition, one problem I have with Benkler’s approach is that he’s so focused on people creating information that he forgets about people receiving it—the community of readers. Anybody with grade-school reading skills and thirty-five cents can read a newspaper. Even less, perhaps, is necessary to watch television or listen to the radio. The community for these media seems large and heterogeneous. The networked community, on the other hand, might be smaller and more exclusive. Some people don’t access the internet at all. Some are only casual users. It just seems inevitable that, at least for now, the networked community is not as large and inclusive as what we typically imagine as the public sphere at large. This is part of why I question Benkler’s suggestion that the “networked public sphere” is an altogether distinct—and superior—public sphere in itself.

I want to respond to Benkler’s “better than what we had” reorientation with a reorientation of my own. Benkler always assumes that the internet has its own public sphere—what the calls the networked public sphere—but it seems to me that instead the internet is simply another medium alongside radio, television, newspapers, and so on. Why would its community be a necessarily distinct “public sphere”? Benkler’s dichotomy of new, networked public sphere vs. old, mass-media model suggests that the internet isn’t a part of mass media. But that’s hardly true. For instance, look at the extent to which radio, film, television, and news overlap with the internet: Youtube, movies online, news websites, television shows online, radio shows online, commercials archived, etc. If anything, the internet seems like an especially indistinct medium considering how much it borrows from and overlaps with other media. I think the internet is a medium rather than a public sphere in itself, and the characteristics that Benkler discusses could simply be conventions of a medium or genre rather than indications of a distinct public sphere.

Commenting on Benkler

I commented on the "whole page" of Benkler's Wealth of Networks chapter 7 and it hasn't shown up, so here's hoping it will be approved by the author and won't just be deleted. Just FYI for everyone else, if you haven't already submitted. It's not an instantaneous addition to the website.

In short, my post to the chapter was, the internet is all great now that it's relatively new but not so new that no one knows how to use it. But it's becoming more regulated the more it's understood and able to fit into legislative schema (I'm thinking particularly of copyright laws). This isn't inherently bad, but it creates more constraints. China is becoming looser while the US is becoming more restricted. Will we meet in the middle, or will everything eventually become constrained as governments and corporations figure out how to get a firm grip on it? I think it's possible, though I imagine something new would take its place and we would start with a little more history than before and it will take less time to get the public sphere back in full strength again, and less time to tighten up. I do see it cycling through development and freedom to restraint and outdatedness faster and faster.

No, really ... who invented the Internet?

Remember Al Gore's famously distorted, misquoted, and media-warped charge, circa the 2000 presidential campaign, that he "invented the Internet"? [The original wording, as liberal pundits have been since vigilant about pointing out, was that he, while acting in the capacity of United States congressman, consistently backed, championed, and initiated legislation which "helped to create the Internet," in his own words ... thanks, Al Franken, for clearing that one up for me.] Well, as it turns out, and as we probably all have since come to understand, Al Gore did not, in fact, "invent" the Internet ... but then again, it seems that no one else really did, either.

Janet Abbate's book labors hard on the side of an "invention" narrative, the kind we saw with Briggs and Burke whose "solitary genius" determinist logic led us through history in terms of names, dates, and respective "inventions". This is not the "invention" of Paul Starr, who wanted us to believe that our media are a group of democratically inspired "creations" stemming from public sphere debate and demand. But while Abbate, in her introduction, mentions "the cast of characters involved in creating the Internet" (2) -- Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, Lawrence Roberts, Tim Berners-Lee and, apparently, the entire National Science Foundation acting as a composite entity, are some highlighted members of this "cast" -- we don't catch much of the legislative/political story from Abbate. Chapter 6, "Popularizing the Internet," begins to sketch this medium's ascendance in popular culture and American life, stating how the Internet "would be transferred from military to civilian control," but it never really gets around to actually showing us this transformation in a socially intelligible manner. Likewise, she explains the Internet's eventual worldwide status and ubiquity in terms of "the convergence of many streams of network developments" (209), as though to say that the world was ready and waiting to accept this new medium without legislative intervention, political struggle, or social consequence. And I'm pretty sure that just isn't the case.

At any rate, I am interested, and annoyed, by the varying centrality of this kind of invention narrative in some of our readings this semester. It is, in many ways, a very traditional way of doing history: names, dates, and places usually amount to "facts" in the high school history textbook sense of the term. And Abbate isn't exactly deviating from this tradition; she is, instead, trying to force it where, perhaps, it just doesn't fit. Inventing the Internet leaves me now wondering if the idea of invention -- a notion "solitary genius" that now ties into concerns such as intellectual property, patent laws, etc. -- even exists anymore. People, it seems, don't invent things anymore, but corporations do and military research teams do.

And, I checked, and Al Gore isn't cited once in Abbate's book. For shame! Read all about how Al Gore kinda sorta invented the internet in this 2000 Washington Monthly article.

Don't bogart that NET, my friend

(How cool would it be to have a computer with a steering wheel? This photo shows how a "home computer" could look in the year 2004.)

Like Dave, I particularly liked how Abbate emphasizes the role that users have played in the development of the Internet over the years, but I share his questioning of this narrative. Here’s how I see it.

Internet users, she argues, aren’t just consumers: they also help to define and develop the Internet, and those definitions and developments, Abbate explains, aren’t merely of the technical sort. She closes her Introduction with a great comment that almost seems like a nod to those of us in the social sciences: “[. . .] the meaning of the Internet had to be invented—and constantly reinvented—at the same time as the technology itself” (6, emphasis added).

In chapter three, “The Most Neglected Element: Users Transform the ARPANET,” Abbate begins to suggest exactly how early Internet users contributed to its development. She explains that new developments like TIP, ANTS, ELF, and USING came about as users at various ARPANET stations defined new needs and new applications for ARPANET. She discusses how users’ enjoyment of email defined a new “major” function of the net and explains its popularity by saying that email provided access to people rather than to computers (109). Abbate even jokes about shady drug deals that were orchestrated by “Inventive students participating in the early 1970s counterculture” (107).

But frankly, I’m suspicious. None of these people sound like “users” to me; they sound like wunderkind computer science graduate students (yes, even the stoner ones). Now, granted, in the “Dream Weaver” era (I mean the song, not the website-making software) computer technology wasn’t available or understandable to the average person. I totally get that. On the other hand, today—when computer technology and internet connectivity is available to most Americans—I still don’t think that users define the direction of the Internet. While I’d like to believe in Abbate’s narrative about users, I don’t think I do.

How much power does the average user really have over the Internet? You can post a video of yourself on Youtube, but then again, you can only do that because the website and its developers made that possible. Youtube probably existed before your ability or desire to post videos of yourself did. Then there are blogs. You can start a blog in about five minutes and use it for political rants or to make copyrighted material available and in doing so stick it to the man. But will your blog change anything? Will anyone even look at it or be able to find it? I keep trying to think of ways that users can change or develop the internet, but I can’t. All I can think of is Youtube, Blogger, Ebay, Craigslist, and MySpace. That suggests to me that users don’t control the Internet; corporations do.

These kind of sites don’t allow us to do anything but what their templates provide. The whole idea of “My” in Myspace is a total misnomer: the ads everywhere show that it’s not really “your space” at all. It’s hired space. And the fact that you’re given these fairly standard templates into which you can insert your pictures and text again suggest that there are serious limits to the “My”-ness.

In other words, I don’t believe the average user can play a role in the development or transformation of the internet. I believe all we can do is what corporations—through popular websites and applications—allow us to do.